Grif Grawley was a Humanmalefarmer who lived on the moonSulon with his wifeCarole and their daughter Katie. When the Grawleys became involved in an anti-Imperial demonstration, the Empire retaliated by burning their home in an attack that killed Katie and scarred Carole. In order to escape further repercussions from the Empire, Grawley and his wife, along with almost four hundred other Sulonese people, were spirited away by the Rebel Alliance sympathizer Morgan Katarn to the planetRuusan. After helping the colonists settle on the planet, Katarn returned to Sulon. Years later, Grawley ran into an Imperial probe droid, PD 4786, while escorting his gra herd animals on a long-range forage. Grawley was able to destroy the droid, and, under the impression that the Empire had found Ruusan, tried to warn the other settlers, but they did not listen.

Imperial forces led by the Dark JediJerec then attacked and destroyed the settlement of Fort Nowhere. The survivors turned to Grawley, who agreed to help them and soon became their leader, as they settled in the ruins of an old temple in the unexplored part of Ruusan. Shortly afterward, Morgan Katarn's son, Kyle, and his companion Jan Ors, arrived on Ruusan and met Grawley and his men, telling them that Morgan had been killed by Jerec. The younger Katarn came to Ruusan on behalf of the Rebel Alliance in an attempt to stop Jerec from obtaining the power located within Ruusan's fabled Valley of the Jedi. Grawley assisted Katarn in his task and led him to the native Bouncers, one of which, Floater, agreed to lead Grawley and the two Rebels to the Valley. While en route, however, the group ran into one of Jerec's probe droids, AD-43. Grawley engaged the droid in melee battle, and used his hunting knife to damage its systems. The droid carried Grawley on its carcass, flew into a canyon wall and exploded, killing Grawley. However, Katarn and Ors were still able to complete their mission, and successfully killed Jerec before he could fully harness the power of the Valley.

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"Once he put us on the ground and got things organized, he borrowed a skimmer and took off. Everybody said he was crazy. Who knows when he ran into the bouncers, but he did. They call him "the knight who never was," whatever that means."

A Humanmale, Grif Grawley was a farmer who lived on the planetSullust's moon of Sulon with his wifeCarole and their young daughter Katie during the Imperial Period. Grawley was on friendly terms with fellow farmer Morgan Katarn and his son Kyle, who eventually left for the Imperial Academy.[1] Tired of life under the oppressive heel of the Galactic Empire, the Grawleys and a number of other Sulonese people tried to exercise their freedom of speech by organizing anti-Imperial meetings, holding them in the privacy of their homes at first, and then in loosely organized gatherings. When it was decided to move their demonstrations to the streets of Sulon's principal city of Barons Hed, the protesters asked Katarn to join them, but he declined the offer, in fear of severe repercussions that might follow from the Empire.[3]

Deriding Katarn as a coward and certain that the Empire would not dare to resort to violence, the Sulonese nevertheless held their demonstration, but disbanded before the Imperials could react and follow with arrests. However, due to a series of holographic recordings taken during the protest and a traitor in the demonstrators' midst, the Empire soon established the identities of the so-called "agitators" of the insurgency,[3] including Grawley and his family.[1] One night, the Empire struck back with a military force that consisted of All Terrain Armored Transports[3] and Viper probe droids[1] to burn the protesters' homes.[3]

Grawley and Carole were outside their house and bore witness to the attack firsthand. They first saw an Imperial probe droid passing near their home, and then a series of blaster shots tore through and set their house on fire. In an attempt to rescue Katie, who was inside at the time of the attack and cried desperately for help, Carole bolted toward the home; Grawley barely pulled his wife back before the structure collapsed, which killed their daughter. Carole had also been severely burned, but nonetheless survived with prominent scars on her face.[1] Two more families were massacred that night, and the Empire made no attempt to hide its involvement in the attacks, evidenced by clearly-visible AT-AT tracks near the scorched buildings.[3] In fear of additional punishment—not excluding the possibility of transportation to slave labor camps—the protesters turned to Katarn for help, and admitted that he had been right all along.[3] Around 2 BBY,[4] Katarn, who had secret ties with the Alliance to Restore the Republic, secured help and funding from Alliance sympathizers and developed a plan to move the people away from Sulon. In the first stage of his plan, Katarn hid Grawley, Carole, and 345 other men, women, and children on an abandoned space station in the Sullust system. Life aboard the space station was difficult due to severe cold and overpopulation.[3]

Katarn then hired the blockade runnerCyclops, which was captained by the smugglerJerg, to transport the fugitives to another planet. Ten years prior to that, Jerg had stumbled upon the planet Ruusan, which he claimed was free of Imperial presence, and Katarn chose to take the Grawleys and the other Sulonese people there.[3] Among the few possessions that the would-be colonists brought with them to Ruusan were fertilized gra ova, a product of genetic engineering that allowed them to grow the gra herd animals. During the long trip to Ruusan, Grif took time to memorize the electronic manual for the gra, and learned about their instincts.[1] After he helped the men under his care settle in and near Fort Nowhere, a military installation built by Jerg's smuggling gang and used as a storage for their goods, Katarn left the planet. Before he did so, however, he ventured into the countryside, where he encountered the native Bouncers, globe-like creatures that sailed on the wind. The settlers noticed that all the Bouncers they met after Katarn's departure called Katarn "the knight who never was," though neither Grawley nor the other colonists knew what that meant.[3] Prior to his departure, Katarn also taught Grawley and the colonists a primitive communications code that he used in order to send signals to his agricultural droids back on Sulon. As the code was no longer used by the Empire, the colonists could use it to safely communicate between themselves and employ as a sort of friend-or-foe identification system.[5]

"So, I tangled with an Imperial probe droid, rammed it with my airspeeder, and hoofed it here. It could have been a loner, dumped into our atmosphere by a passing ship, or it could be part of something a lot worse. I suggest you pack what you can, load your families on skimmers, and follow me. There are places where you can hide."

As the years passed, Grawley and Carole settled on their newfound home planet, and lived in a house dug in a hillside twenty klicks south of Fort Nowhere, faced south to take advance of the winter sun. On Ruusan, they returned to their work as farmers, although they found it much harder than it had been on Sulon due to scarcity of water, and they came to refer to what they did as "outcropping." In addition to the harvest of crops, the Grawleys looked over a personal garden and possessed a herd of gra. Although his life entered a steady stream, Grawley could not forget the sight of his daughter's death and started to drink. On the eve of Katie's birthday[1] around 4 ABY,[6] Grawley attempted to anesthetize himself with a bottle of an alcoholic beverage called the "Old Trusty" at the Smuggler's Restcantina in Fort Nowhere. He was so drunk that Carole had to come to the cantina, load him into an airspeeder, and drive him home. The event made Grawley a target for mockery from the cantina patrons.[1]

Grif Grawley piloting his airspeeder

In 5 ABY,[2] six months after his intoxication incident, Grawley traveled in his speeder to the countryside, following the gra[1] on a long-range forage.[5] As night approached, the creatures traveled to the nearby hills in order to escape predators, following their genetically-programmed instincts. Grawley stopped at Hill 461 for night and activated Fido, a boomerang-shaped machine of his own design that was equipped with a variety of sensors and was supposed to alert him to any danger. After he used a comm unit to say goodnight to Carole, Grawley checked Fido's sensor readings. The machine assured him that everything was alright, except for the fact that the network of weather and surveillance satellites, established by the smugglers who had built Fort Nowhere, had gone offline. Grawley was not very alarmed and assumed that the problem would soon be fixed.[1]

Grawley spent some time looking at the sunset with a bottle of the Old Trusty, but, thinking that Carole would not approve of him drinking, he took his electrobinoculars and walked to the highest point of the hill, hoping to have a glimpse at the native Bouncers, whom he found fascinating. Switching to infrared mode, Grawley saw what he at first thought was a Bouncer. However, he then noticed that the heat signature was too intense and too high in the air,[1] and that the object moved against the wind.[5] Grawley realized that the object was an Imperial probe droid and that it had spotted him. He wondered if the probe had been launched by a passing scoutship, which was consistent with standard Imperial scouting procedure, or if it had been deployed by a ship currently stationed in orbit, which would have explained why the satellites had gone offline. Whatever the case, Grawley realized that he must destroy the droid and warn the other settlers. Taking the controls of his speeder, he drove straight at the machine, grabbing his blaster rifle and standing up for better aim. He shot at the droid twice; the first shot missed entirely, while the second one barely scratched the droid's carcass. The droid responded by firing its own weapons at his speeder.[1]

Grawley realized that the droid outgunned him, turned the vehicle, and pushed it down toward the surface. The tactic helped Grawley gain more forward momentum, while at the same time forced the droid to convert more of its on board computing capacity to low-level navigation. Taking advantage of his knowledge of the local terrain, Grawley headed toward a nearby ridge and stopped his vehicle at the top. The droid lost the speeder's heat signature behind the rock, and switched to its holocams. Grawley then grabbed his handmade remote controller for the speeder and his blaster rifle and jumped to the ground. Activating the remote control, he accelerated the speeder away from the probe droid, and the droid started firing at it. Maneuvering the speeder with the controller, Grawley set it on a collision course with the droid. When the speeder rammed the droid, both machines exploded. He took the droid's ID plate—which read PD 4786—as proof, and set off to Fort Nowhere to warn the settlers of the fact that the Empire had found them. After an exhausting fifty-kilometer journey on foot, Grawley reached the gates of Fort Nowhere at sunset the next day.[1]

At the city gates, he was greeted by a sentry named Horley, from whom Grawley learned that the city's mayor, Byron Devo III, was in the Smuggler's Rest. As he entered the Rest, Grawley was met with a round of mocking among the regulars, who remembered the night six months before. Silencing the crowd by destroying the cantina's sound system with his rifle, Grawley showed the patrons the droid's ID plate and told them about his encounter with the droid. He advised them to evacuate Fort Nowhere immediately, but most of the colonists did not really believe his words, due to Grawley's reputation as a drunk. He then asked Marie Peeno, Captain Jerg's second-in-command, about the sudden deactivation of the weather satellites. Peeno told everyone that the satellites had all went down at the same time and had not come online since. She also said that there were no starships in orbit that they could contact, as Jerg had left the planet and taken all the smuggler ships with him and was not expected to return in a month.[1] Still, Mayor Devo was certain that the Empire had not found them yet, and even if it had, he was certain that any attack against Fort Nowhere would be futile, due to the Fort having been turned into a fortress by Jerg's smugglers.[5] Realizing that he could not convince the settlers to leave the Fort, Grawley angrily exited the cantina and returned home to Carole, who was already worried for him being late.[1]

Grawley had been right in his suspicions, as the destroyed droid had been dispatched by the Dark JediJerec. Jerec sought to harness the power of Ruusan's fabled Valley of the Jedi, which contained the trapped souls of the Jedi and Sith who had perished in the final battle of the New Sith Warsa thousand years prior. When Jerec's forces attacked Fort Nowhere, many colonists were killed, while survivors were forced to flee into the badlands and turn to Grawley for help.[1] Grawley led the survivors to the previously unexplored territories, where they found the ruins of a temple—which had been used by the Jedi as a stronghold during the war—and settled there. Shortly thereafter, Grawley and his men witnessed a ship approaching the ruins of Fort Nowhere. In an attempt to identify the affiliation of the ship's pilots, the colonists used Morgan Katarn's old code, encoding the coordinates for a landing site with it. The ship landed at the prescribed location, which indicated that its pilots were not Imperial.[5]

Grawley dispatched Fido to have a look at the newcomers with its holocams, while he and Carole laid in hiding. By using Fido, Grawley inspected the ship and its crew, which consisted of a man and a woman, the former of whom he recognized as Kyle, the son of Morgan Katarn. Grawley flew Fido to his and Carole's position and back to Katarn several times, giving Katarn a signal to follow the machine. The two flew their starship to the temple, following Fido's lead. There, Grawley greeted Katarn, but being unsure of where his loyalties lay, ordered him and his companion to surrender their weapons. Katarn then introduced his companion, Jan Ors, and went on to explain that his fatherhad been killed by Jerec years earlier. The younger Katarn had defected from the Empire when he had become aware of his father's death. He subsequently became a Rebel agent, and, along with Ors, was trying to foil Jerec's plans for galactic domination. Moreover, Katarn claimed that he had recently discovered that he was a Jedi.[1]

Grawley, Katarn, and Ors meeting the Bouncers

One of the colonists, Luther Pardy, who was in possession of Katarn's confiscated weapons, initially doubted his story, which prompted Katarn to Force-pull his lightsaber from Pardy's hands. The colonists drew their blasters, but Grawley, convinced that the Rebels were on their side, ordered them to stand down. Offering his help to the pair, Grawley proposed to meet with the Bouncers, seek their counsel, and ask for their help in finding the Valley. Grawley, Katarn, Ors, and six colonists took refuge in a temple of stone near the site where the Bouncers were most likely to appear. As they were waiting for the Bouncers to come, Grawley told Katarn about his father's meeting with the globe-like beings. When the Bouncers finally appeared and the group was ready to move out and meet them, Katarn spotted an Imperial skimmer and two speeder bikes moving toward the Bouncers. The newcomers were Jerec's troops, who intended to slaughter the Bouncers for fun, and opened fire on the gathered group.[1]

Unwilling to let the Bouncers be killed, Ors took out one speeder bike with a carefully-placed shot from a blaster rifle, causing the rest of the Imperials to fire back at Grawley and the others. Although one of the colonists was killed in the firefight, the fight was soon won by the Rebels and Grawley's men, who, with help from the Bouncers—who also lost one of their own—killed all the Imperials, and obtained the skimmer and one of the bikes relatively intact. In order to keep their presence secret, Grawley's men buried the Imperials in carefully camouflaged graves. Using a combat knife to carve words in the sand, Katarn then communicated with the leader of the Bouncers.[1]

One of the Bouncers, whom Grawley referred to as Floater, agreed to serve as a guide to the Valley of the Jedi for Katarn and help them reach it without running into Imperial troops. When the Rebel agent asked the Bouncer leader if he knew if they would succeed in stopping Jerec, the Bouncer replied by writing down a line from the Poem of Ages, the same poem they had told to Kyle's father, and which stated that a knight would come who would fight a battle and would free the spirits of Jedi and Sith trapped in the Valley. Katarn wanted to look for other scrap from the battle that could potentially point to their involvement in the patrol's disappearance, but Grawley believed that they had to leave before dawn.[1] Although Ors wanted to depart for the Valley immediately, Katarn felt that the time was not right and decided to regroup at the temple. Grawley and his men, alongside the two Rebels and Floater, then returned to the colonists' base.[5]

Shortly afterward, Fido spotted an Imperial force consisting of an AT-ST and an AT-AT nearby. In an effort to spy on the Imperials and—in case they headed toward the temple—to lead them away, Grawley, Katarn and Ors took the recently captured skimmer and set off to a hiding place near the base, where they monitored the Imperial forces. Katarn suddenly felt in the Force that the patrol was being led by one of Jerec's Dark Jedi and that the Dark Jedi had felt the Rebels too. However, much to Katarn's surprise, no attack followed; in fact, the Imperial group was commanded by Yun, a Dark Jedi whom Katarn had previously had the chance to kill but decided to spare. Although Yun's troops had found a helmet belonging to stormtrooperRW957 from the fallen Imperial patrol, Yun decided to repay the debt to Katarn and stalled his forces.[1]

Realizing that Jerec's troops were still unaware of the presence of Grawley's men on Ruusan, Katarn decided to proceed with his planned infiltration of the Valley of the Jedi, where Jerec's men had already begun excavation works. At nightfall, Grawley, Katarn, Ors, Katarn's droid WeeGee, and Floater all boarded Katarn's ship, the Moldy Crow, and flew to the Valley, landing five kilometers from the Valley in order to avoid detection. WeeGee was left hidden with the ship under a camouflage net, while Grawley and the two Rebels set off for the Valley through the mountains, led by Floater. At dawn, they were half a kilometer from the Valley, ascending the nearly vertical slope of a brittle ravine. When Grawley pulled himself up onto a broad shelf, however, he witnessed a probe droid, AD-43, that was alerted to the Rebels' presence.[1]

There was no time to pull out his blaster; therefore, Grawley acted on the first notion that came to his mind and charged at the droid with open arms. The droid slammed into him, and they both floated over the abyss. As the droid seized one of his legs and crushed it with powerful pincers, Grawley pulled out his knife and proceeded to strike the droid repeatedly, attempting to avenge everything that the Empire had done to him and his family. Katarn and Ors could only watch helplessly at the fight between the man and the machine, not risking to fire their weapons due to the high risk of accidentally hitting Grawley. Grawley's frenzied attack damaged the droid's critical systems, and it plunged into the canyon wall, taking Grawley with it and killing both in an explosion. Before it was destroyed, however, AD-43 managed to report spotting Grawley and his companions, allowing Jerec to set a trap for Katarn.[1] Grawley's death angered Katarn, making him even more determined to kill Jerec.[5] Katarn and Ors succeeded in thwarting Jerec's plans, killing him and his entire cadre of Dark Jedi and fulfilling the Bouncers' prophecy.[1]

By 5 ABY, Grif Grawley was no longer a young man, but he was in better physical shape than most men half his age. Despite that, he found himself tired during the fifty-kilometer long return trip to Fort Nowhere.[1] However, he was more used to scrambling rocky terrain.[5] When he, Kyle Katarn, and Jan Ors were climbing a mountain to spy on the Imperial patrol and, later, to reach the Valley of the Jedi, Katarn was out of breath, while Grawley seemed almost entirely unaffected.[1][5] Grawley was a skilled mechanic, having built Fido by hand from whatever parts he could buy, borrow, or steal, and having assembled his speeder from salvage. He also constructed the remote control for the vehicle. He was very attached to his machines and had a penchant for giving names to them, even naming the water pump at his home "Jenny." During his encounter with the first probe droid, Grawley talked to his speeder, willing the rusty vehicle to work, and was later sorry when he was forced to sacrifice the speeder in order to destroy the probe droid. Grawley also possessed a hunting knife half a meter long, whose blade had been fashioned from diamond-hard hull metal.[1]

Grif and Carole Grawley

Grawley deeply loved his wife Carole, and considered her gorgeous even after she was severely burned while trying to rescue their daughter Katie. He was deeply affected by the loss of his daughter. Haunted by the feeling of helplessness that he had felt during her death, Grawley attempted to find relief in alcohol. However, his indulgence only led to embarrassment. Grawley earned a reputation as a drunkard at Fort Nowhere, and the cantina regulars at the Smuggler's Rest laughed at his expense, which angered him. When fighting the probe droid AD-43, Grawley attempted to exact his revenge on the Empire by destroying the machine. He considered Morgan Katarn an interesting man and was disappointed to find that Katarn had been killed. Although some of the settlers feared and loathed the Bouncers, Grawley was fascinated by them, learning about their habits and trying to have a look at them at every opportunity. When he started telling Kyle Katarn about the Bouncers in great detail, such interest surprised Katarn and made Grawley feel self-conscious.[1] During the battle with the Imperial patrol, Grawley was shocked when he saw Katarn killing the Imperials with his lightsaber.[5]

Grawley could not get used to the heat and dust of Ruusan and found it difficult to work as a farmer there, as water was hard to come by. He seriously considered undertaking cave-farming, a practice performed by other settlers in which plants were grown by artificial light. However, he realized the disadvantages of that method, and he did not like the prospect of being confined to a cave.[5] On the other hand, the time spent on Ruusan taught Grawley to improvise[1] and make do with what he had.[5] During his encounter with the probe droid in the desert, Grawley displayed quick thinking, using the speeder's ability to fly at low levels and the local terrain to his advantage. He also became skilled in navigating Ruusan's terrain and was able to find his way back to Fort Nowhere without any navigational equipment. Overall, Grawley and his wife tried to take their hard life on Ruusan lightly, jokingly calling a flat piece of hard-packed dirt near their home "the veranda." Grawley himself displayed a somewhat sarcastic sense of humor, referring to Devo III as the "fat guy who thought he was a mayor," which made Horley chuckle. Although the smugglers who built Fort Nowhere claimed that there were ruins on the three moons of Ruusan, Grawley was not interested in such assertions.[1]

After Fort Nowhere was destroyed by Jerec's troops, and the "townies"—as Grawley called the town folk—turned to him for help, Grawley agreed to assist them despite the fact that they had not listened to his earlier warnings about the probe droid. He eventually became the leader of the survivors, and Carole was amazed that her normally tactless husband never reminded the town people of their mistaken judgment. In turn, the survivors followed Grawley's orders without question. As the leader of the survivors, Grawley was cautious, ordering Katarn to surrender his weapons until they could find out more about him, and later made use of shadows to maintain a low profile while he, Katarn, and Ors drove the stolen skimmer in order to spy on Yun's troops. However, he believed that the odds of Imperials finding any remnant of the missing patrol was very small and did not spend time to look for any remaining leads, but he was proven wrong when Yun's men found RW957's helmet.[1]

Dark Forces: Rebel Agent implies that Morgan Katarn has evacuated the Sulonese after three families, including the Grawleys, have been massacred. However, the audio dramatization of Rebel Agent implies that most of the colonists have listened to Katarn's warnings and have evacuated, while three families have stayed behind and been massacred. As such, the Grawleys are not among the three massacred families mentioned in the Rebel Agent audio drama. As a result of this alternative portrayal of events, the Jedi Knight audio drama makes no mention of Katie's death and Carole's scarring. In the Jedi Knight audio drama, Grawley learns of the satellites malfunctioning while communicating with Carole. He then hears the impact of the probe droid landing. Still keeping contact with Carole, he tells her to warn the other settlers of the droid, while he goes to check it.

The encounter with the droid that follows is also abridged in the audio drama, wherein Grawley simply turns the speeder around and uses it as a battering ram, jumping right before the impact. In Jedi Knight, when Grawley reaches the gates of Fort Nowhere, he is informed by Horley that Carole is worried for him, and Grawley says that he will call her. However, in the audio drama, Grawley asks Horley to call Carole. In the audio drama, Grawley, Katarn and Ors do not go to spy on Yun's patrol. Instead, Yun senses them from afar while they are still at the temple. There is also a difference between the two publications regarding the portrayal of Grawley's death scene. In the audio drama, Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors stop to catch their breath while climbing the mountains, but Floater insists on going further, and Grawley follows him, which is when he runs into AD-43. In The Official Star Wars Fact File 124, the image of Grawley fighting the droid AD-43 is mistakenly captioned as depicting Morgan Katarn's capture by a probe droid on Sulon.

↑According to the Dark Forces: Jedi Knight audio drama, it is mentioned by Grawley that Katarn brought the colonists to Ruusan eight years before the audio drama's narrative takes place. The New Essential Chronology places the events of Jedi Knight several months in 5 ABY. As Katarn is mentioned securing the Rebel Alliance's help in order to transport the prisoners in Dark Forces: Jedi Knight, it must have happened after the Alliance's formation in 2 BBY, accounting for a little more than a seven-year gap, which is close to the eight years mentioned by Grawley.